Wrapping Presents

I’m loving the holiday season and I definitely have presents on the brain (it could be because its my birthday too)!  With that said, what a great way to get kids involved and work on some fine motor skills than to have them help with wrapping the presents.  Not only will they work on the following skills but they will also have a ton of pride when they give the gifts to their teachers or therapists or friends or siblings or parents (I could go on and on but I’m sure you get my drift)!

They will work on:

• Scissor skills to cut the paper
• Spatial awareness for measuring how much paper they need
• Visual motor skills to fold the paper and line up the edges
• Bilateral coordination to use both hands to fold the paper, hold it still while applying tape, cutting the paper
• Hand strengthening to firmly fold the edges and push down on the tape
• And ripping tape (which is fun) works on a bunch of skills – grasp patterns, hand strength and bilateral upper extremity coordination

Now I know that it will probably take longer to wrap presents with your ‘helper’ but think of how much fun they will have and the skills they are working on!

Gingerbread for Fine Motor Development

Since its the holiday season, and my nephew was over visiting again, we decided to make gingerbread men.  Luckily the dough was already made (downside is we didn’t get to work on the skills/benefits listed in the cookie dough post) but we got to do everything else!

  

We worked on bilateral coordination and upper extremity/hand strengthening while we used our hands to make the dough into a round ball and then we used a rolling pin to roll it out flat.

There was some more bilateral coordination as well as precision when we used the cookie cutter to cut the shape and then peel the excess dough away from our cut out so we could put the cookie on the tray.

  

Once they were cooked we got to decorate them.  We used icing and little candies which allowed us to work on pincer grasp, precision, and hand strengthening for squeezing out the icing.  Although we only decorated a few like men and the rest were more abstract, it can also be used to work on body awareness by decorating eyes, nose, mouth, hands, feet, etc.

The best part of course was eating them when we were finished!